BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  As I turned around to reply, I saw that she had kept the remains of the rain jacket and was wearing it over her shoulders with the hood up. All she needed was the basket of cookies to make her into Grandma in the fairy tale.

  “If there’s a colorblind wolf in the vicinity, you’ll be in serious trouble.”

  Cassie smiled at me crookedly.

  “That Little Red Riding Hood wasn’t too smart.”

  “And she was quite nearsighted,” I said. “How can you mistake a wolf for your Grandmother?”

  “The mother was careless. Think of sending a little girl alone through the forest with a basket of cookies!”

  “You, two, stop playing and pay attention,” the professor said from the back. “Whatever it is we’re looking for, it must be pretty close. Let’s not miss it completely.”

  A few feet ahead, Iak reached down to feel the ground. First with a stick and then with his hand he removed a thin layer of humus and dirt. With the same thought the three of us knelt beside him and pushed away the mud with our hands.

  To our disappointment we only managed to uncover a large slab of stone with no inscription. That, and get all muddied again.

  “All for nothing.” The professor sighed as he stood up once again. “We’ll have to keep looking.”

  “What I don’t know,” Cassie said looking up doubtfully at the canopy of greenery over our heads, “is how we’re going to realize we’ve reached that fringe of trees we saw from the cliff. It looked clear enough from up there, but down here everything’s too dark and thick to make anything out.”

  All this time, I had been staring at that suspiciously flat rock. Suddenly, in an inspired frenzy, I began to clear away a wider area of ground using my forearms like shovels. Something told me there was more there than met the eye.

  “If you’re thinking of clearing up the whole jungle,” Cassie said as she watched me with arms crossed, “I’m warning you, it’s going to take you a while.”

  Even the Menkragnoti made fun of me. “You peccary looking for food,” he said.

  I refused to acknowledge them. The more ground I cleared the stronger the image forming in my head was.

  At last I looked up. “Are you going to help, or are you just going to keep on staring like that?”

  “Help you do what?” the professor asked. “We’ve no idea what you’re doing.”

  “Can’t you see? I’m trying to clear this up!”

  “Oh, yeah, we can see that. But, what for?”

  “You just help me and you’ll find out.”

  My friends exchanged looks, but finally the professor shrugged his shoulders and crouched down beside me. Cassie soon joined us, followed by Iak, and although with little conviction they began to help me. In a short while, thanks to our joint effort, we had cleared an area of a hundred and fifty square feet or so. Satisfied, I asked them to stand up and take a few steps back to appreciate the results.

  “What do you think?” I said excitedly. “Awesome. Huh?”

  Cassandra stopped wiping the mud from her clothes and looked up.

  “Awesome? I can’t see anything there.”

  “Neither can I,” the professor said. “All I can see is a bed of stone and some loose pebbles here and there. I don’t see anything awesome anywhere.”

  “Look again,” I insisted.

  Iak squinted his eyes, straining to see. Finally, tilting his head forward he said, “It look like… path.”

  The other two examined the area that opened before them, with its scattering of small trees.

  “Well, strike me pink if he isn’t right,” the professor whispered.

  “It’s true,” Cassie agreed. “The edges seem to be clearly defined… and it’s set at an exact angle.” She looked at the ground more closely. “This rock bed… a long time ago it must’ve been something like huge paving stones that fit into each other.”

  She turned to me wide-eyed with something unusually bright in her gaze.

  “How did you know?”

  “To be honest, it didn’t take much. I just remembered some of the Roman ways I know in Spain that are still used as trekking paths after two thousand years. The rest was just association of ideas, and luckily they ended up being correct.”

  “Anyway,” the professor said, “I wouldn’t have realized if I’d been on my own.” He gave me a friendly nudge and added, “It’ll turn out you’re not as dumb as you look.”

  I was not totally sure this was a compliment. “Wow, thanks!”

  “Then, if there’s a paved road,” Cassie said thoughtfully, “that means—”

  “Nobody builds a causeway like this just to go nowhere,” I said firmly. “This may be the first real proof that the Black City is more than a myth, that Jack Fawcett’s statements in his journal about Z weren’t just ramblings, and that—”

  “…and that my daughter is somewhere in that direction,” the professor whispered with suppressed emotion, his feet already on the stone way and his eyes turned west.

  36

  Overwhelmed by the oppressive silence of the forest, we followed the faint trace of the stone pathway. At times it emerged from the mud as a causeway several yards wide. In general, though, it was nothing but a vague shadow, a blurred strip where the trees seemed unable to take root.

  Another remarkable thing was that, in contrast to the straight, practically flat line of the causeway, the land on either side looked strange. Along the margins, right and left, there was a scattering of mounds and heaps of vaguely regular shapes like an ancient escort of soldiers worn down by time.

  As we went on, we noticed that the heaps were becoming more frequent. We also noticed that straight ahead of us, the thing which from a distance we had taken to be some kind of low mesa was gradually revealing itself as a solid mesh of thorny bushes. It was a sort of gigantic hedge similar to the one we had gone through with so much difficulty when we left the river. Under no circumstance were we going to face something like that again. None of us dared even to suggest it.

  We finally reached the end of this causeway. It finished abruptly and inexplicably at the impenetrable green wall. We stopped in front of it and studied the surroundings thoroughly to make sure the way did not carry on in some other direction from that point.

  “This is a dead end,” I said, baffled. “Why would anybody build a road that doesn’t go anywhere?”

  “Perhaps… we’ve passed it by,” the professor said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that maybe…” He thought for a moment as he looked back the way we had come. “Maybe we’ve overlooked something, some kind of sidetrack we couldn’t see. A sidetrack that led to the real ruins of Z. We’ve taken for granted that this was a main road but what if we’re wrong? Maybe it’s the end of a secondary road.”

  Cassandra cleared her throat in loud disagreement. She pointed at the ground.

  “Can you just imagine what it must have cost them to build a stone causeway like this one, here in the middle of the jungle? If you don’t mind me saying so, your idea of a secondary road is pure bullshit.”

  The professor was taken aback. “Oh really? And I suppose you have a better explanation!”

  “Well, in fact, I do,” she said with assurance. “I can think of a much simpler one. What if… we’d already been to Z?”

  Professor Castillo squinted his eyes as if he had not heard this.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Think about it,” Cassie said, pointing back at the path. “We’ve been walking for miles on a totally straight stone causeway, surrounded by heaps and mounds which could perfectly well be the ruins of statues or small buildings. In my opinion, we’ve been walking through the Black City without even realizing it.”

  “But aren’t those heaps too scattered to be the remains of a city?” the professor said. “To me it looks like an unkempt garden with a lot of dirt mounds in it. I can’t see the concentration of remains we should expect in those circumstances.”

&n
bsp; “In those circumstances?” Cassie asked, irony in her voice. “Are you serious? What this causeway represents is something absolutely out of the ordinary! We haven’t the slightest idea who lived here or why they built whatever it is they built here in the middle of this jungle!” She waved her arms at the surroundings as she paused for breath. “Maybe they didn’t like to build. Or else they didn’t have temples. Or else, except for the statues, they built everything out of wood and adobe and that’s why there’s nothing left. We really don’t know anything about anything to do with this city or civilization, Professor! So to assume that what we’ve seen back there aren’t the remains of a city, just because they don’t look like the ruins of the Parthenon, would be pretty arrogant of us, don’t you think so?”

  Cassie was exhausted after her speech. The professor unwilling to provoke the passionate Mexican’s rage once again, kept silent.

  “What do you say, Iak?” I said, curious to know our guide’s opinion. “Do you think the way we’ve come could be the legendary Black City?”

  The blue-eyed Indian let out a long breath.

  “Iak not know,” he said after a while. “Legend talk of big city like nobody build before. Talk of kings of all peoples come here to see great temples and worship their gods for long, long time.”

  “If that’s so,” the professor said looking at Cassie out of the corner of his eye, “that would rule out a city built of wood and adobe.”

  She was reluctant to give up her theory. “I wouldn’t be so quick to affirm that. He’s talking about an indigenous legend, after all.”

  The irony of it suddenly struck me. “Well, after all, it’s because of an indigenous legend that we’re here in the first place, right?”

  A good while later, the professor and Cassie were still holding fast to their conjectures, entangled in a fiercely complex argument about the architecture of Mesoamerican buildings. Meanwhile, Iak remained crouching at the edge of the causeway with his gaze lost in a void, and I focused my own attention both on the green wall in front of us and on the path that lost itself at the foot of it.

  At that moment an absurd idea came into my mind, and I decided to test it. Without a word I took the machete from Iak’s hands and hacked at the nearest liana. It split cleanly, letting forth a thin trickle of water.

  My friends immediately stopped arguing and looked at me in surprise.

  “What are you doing?” the professor asked as he watched me attack the thicket like Don Quixote the windmills.

  “Have you gone crazy?” Cassie said mockingly. “The lianas haven’t done anything wrong.”

  I did not bother to answer. If I was wrong there would be plenty of time for them to tease me later.

  The sharp machete cut through the thick vegetation like a knife through a birthday cake. With each stroke I prayed I would not come upon a poisonous snake; I knew they loved to lurk in places like these. So I kept my eyes on the lianas above me as well as where I put my feet.

  Finally, after hacking my way through several yards of thicket, I realized my feet were on the stone causeway.

  Just as I had thought.

  The path was still there.

  I turned to tell the others about my discovery. The professor, Iak, and Cassandra were observing me in silent awe from the entrance to the narrow passage.

  On all fours, because there was no room for anything else, I kept opening a way for myself, like a miner digging a tunnel, with strokes that were growing steadily weaker. After twenty minutes of struggling against Mother Nature, my right arm was all cramped with the effort.

  “It’s getting darker in here…” Cassie muttered behind me.

  “I can’t see where I’m going,” the professor said, also in a low voice. “If there’s a snake around, I’m sure I’ll step on it.”

  I leaned on the machete to get my breath back. “Don’t worry, Doc. If I come across one, I’ll let you know with a good yell of agony. And by the way, I think I can see light ahead.”

  “You can see light?” Cassandra said. “Then what are you waiting for? Come on! Don’t stop!”

  “Give me a moment to recover. I can’t even feel my arm.”

  “No way, man! You’ll rest later,” she urged raising her voice. “You’ve got to get us out of here, fast!”

  Having lived with her I knew it was best not to cross her and simply do as she said. I clenched my teeth and went on hacking with all my might until a way opened up toward that thin ray of sunlight that came fitfully through the foliage.

  At last, when I was just about to give up, the vegetation began to thin out. After a few more strokes, which needed both my hands in order to give me enough force, I managed to open a small gap.

  As if I had finally reached the surface after a long dive, I poked my head out of that hole to breathe the fresh air. The sunlight blinded me after nearly half an hour in that deep darkness.

  Gradually, I regained my sight.

  First, shadows and lights.

  Then, faint shapes and colors.

  When I could see clearly what I had in front of me, I refused to believe what my eyes were telling me.

  It was something too real and at the same time too fantastic to accept.

  37

  The others came trampling out of the narrow green tunnel after me.

  Their reaction was also of disbelief.

  Total, absolute disbelief.

  Never in their wildest dreams could they have imagined the ruins of Z would be anything like what we were facing.

  It was like nothing I had ever seen before, and judging by the expressions on their faces Cassie and the professor were feeling just the same.

  We could make out about half a dozen stone structures insinuating themselves through and above the thick forest. Although they were eroded, partly ruined, and covered by the mantle of vegetation, I had no doubt that these were the remains of buildings.

  The closest one was undeniably square. Broken columns emerged from the rubble covered in vines.

  But that was only the closest one.

  We could glimpse other structures whose appearance was both more defined and less explicable. One of them, for example, looked like the base for something like an Egyptian obelisk whose remains lay broken at the foot of it wrapped in a shroud of ivy.

  What left us completely speechless were two steep hills, regularly shaped, located on both sides of us and covered by a thick tangle of vegetation. Below this tangle, two tiered pyramids rose majestically above the treetops.

  The pyramid nearest to us was on our left. It rested on a wide base almost two hundred feet across and rose, tier by tier, at an angle of some forty-five degrees. At the top, partially hidden, was a great black stone cube looking out over the forest canopy.

  Overwhelmed by what she was seeing, Cassandra fell on her back. She remained sitting on the ground in awe.

  Professor Castillo kept his balance as he babbled unconnected sentences and pointed right and left with eyes about to pop and trembling hands.

  Meanwhile, our Menkragnoti friend had turned to face the sun and began to deliver a litany of prayers in his intricate language, passing his hands over his face and then raising them to the sky. Whether he was showing gratitude or begging forgiveness for being there I had no way of telling.

  “Well, if this isn’t the Black City, it must be something very much like it,” I said coming out of my own stupor.

  There’s no way of judging the time we spent there in fascination, hypnotized by the unbelievable spectacle before our eyes.

  If it had not been for Iak, who pointed out that the sun was sinking low on the horizon and that we needed to look for somewhere to spend the night, we would have stayed there spellbound for hours without moving.

  Finally we made our way along the stone causeway. We stepped cautiously and in complete silence, intimidated by the structures around us. We felt that the ruined city was some sort of sacred place, and that we were trespassers. It was as though we had burst into
Olympus without knocking first.

  I put my hand to my ear. “Can you hear it?” I whispered.

  The three of them stopped to listen, but after a few seconds they all shook their heads.

  “I can’t hear a thing,” Cassandra said, also in a low voice.

  “Exactly. There’s no sound whatsoever. It’s like a graveyard.”

  “Well, it’s been like this for days, hasn’t it? the professor said.”

  “Not like this,” I insisted. “Now we can’t even hear any insects. This is absolute silence.”

  The professor listened again. “It’s true,” he confirmed, uneasily. “You can’t even hear the wind.”

  “Land of Morcegos, land of death…” Iak intoned. He looked around visibly nervous. “Land of Morcegos, land of death…”

  “This cuate. He’s is driving me crazy with his endless chorus about Morcegos,” Cassie grumbled.

  “That makes two of us,” the professor said.

  “Come on, I’m sure the Morcegos are just a legend, to keep strangers away from this place, ” I said.

  “A legend… like you mean this city is just a legend?” Cassie retorted.

  “Well, think about it. Have you seen any cultivated land since we left the river? Or traces of paths, or anything to mark a territorial boundary? Humans always leave traces, however slight. What tribe could manage to live in such a remote territory, without either hunting or harvesting?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but the Menkragnoti was quick to answer. “Morcegos not tribe.”

  We all looked at him expectantly.

  “Morcegos just…”—he took a deep breath—“Morcegos.”

  Shortly after, with the last traces of sunset fading above us, we made for the nearest pyramid in spite of Iak’s reluctance. It would be the best place to spend the night, we decided, if we could manage to reach its base before darkness took over the jungle.

  We cut four green branches as handles, and then made crisscross cuts in one end. With some dry twigs wedged in the cuts, coated with a little resin so they would light more easily, we now had some rudimentary torches. In this way we reached the foot of the pyramid like a group of modern cave dwellers and began to ascend one side, with the aid of the lianas and small trees that covered it.